Why Must We Dream in Metaphors?

Why Must We Dream in Metaphors?

The poet Willis Barnstone begins a poem with this line: "Why must I always see the death in things?" My poem would begin, "Why must I always see the metaphor in things?" If I have any intellectual strength it is in seeing connections between unlikely ideas, theories, and concepts. I sit in classes, in front of the television, in front of books and my brain constantly tries to see how what I donít understand relates to, is like, compares to things I already know about. Part of the poetic process is to be on the lookout constantly for these metaphors, these comparisons between unlike things constantly, as (in a metaphorical sense) a mechanic might hear a car coming down the street and from the noise of the engine discern a kind of secret knowledge, an awareness, that is lost on other hearers.

The strong arm of metaphor has led to statements like, "Thatís why schema theory is a kind of Swiss army knife" or "using consultation is like deciding whether to fix your own transmission". Also: good teaching is very often about finding metaphors that give students another way of relating new material to what they have already more or less experienced. The other day I was trying to explain how I expected a paper to be structured, and I found myself saying, "Remember when you came home late from a date and you built an argument to show your parents that coming home late was a perfectly reasonable, even inevitable occurrence given the circumstances?" Even telling stories about my teaching is a kind of metaphor: that is, Iím saying that my experience as a white male teaching in a small high school will be like the experience of my students.

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) spend much of their book talking about where metaphors come from, how they function in conversation, what their tie to underlying social structures might be. However, I read the book hungrily looking for some information about why metaphors serve a purpose that nothing else seems to for me. Finally, near the end I found this statement:

The reason we have focused so much on metaphor is that it unites reason and imagination. Reason, at the very least, involves categorization, entailment, and inference. Imagination, in one of its many aspects, involves seeing one kind of thing in terms of another kind of thing­­what we have called metaphorical thought.